15:00 - 16:40
P14-S337
Room: 0A.08
Chair/s:
Nicholas Kuipers
Discussant/s:
Sarah Brierley, Justin de Benedictis-Kessner
PR1125: The Influence of Police Unions in Local Elections: Evidence from U.S. Cities Spending and Performance
P14-S337-1
Presented by: Maria Carreri
Maria Carreri 1, 2, Edoardo Teso 3, Rui Yu 4
1 UC Berkeley
2 Bocconi
3 Northwestern
4 The Brattle Group
Despite a surge in attention to local policies governing public safety issues, and despite mounting news reports highlighting large sums donated by police unions to local candidates, scholars have largely ignored the role that unions of police officers play in local politics and policy. More generally, evidence on campaign financing in U.S. local elections is very scant. In this project, we have put together the first large scale dataset on campaign finance in mayoral elections – covering 1073 cities and 2303 elections between 2000 and 2019, – which allows us to examine the extent, determinants, and effects of police unions’ donations in local elections. First, we establish a set of new descriptive facts on the involvement of police unions in funding local elections. Second, leveraging within-city variation in police unions’ donations over time, we show that in cities with a mayor backed by police unions, police departments obtain significantly more benefits and resources, but police performance does not significantly improve.
Keywords: police unions; local elections; interest groups; accountability; campaign finance

Sponsors